However, fourteen of Milgram’s forty subjects defied orders and refused to deliver the strongest shocks. They were nonconformists. They said things like, “I can’t go on with this; no, this isn’t right.” And “I’m sorry, I can’t do that to a man. I’ll hurt his heart. You take your check…No, really, I couldn’t do it.” They felt morally unable to continue hurting a fellow human being.

What’s more, in versions of Milgram’s experiment where there were two confederates who refused to deliver the most intense shocks, only 10 percent, rather than 65 percent, of participants268 revved the shocks to the highest level. It’s a finding that has surfaced again and again in studies: “Principled deviants,” as psychologists call them, tend to rein in the cruelty of their compatriots and prod them toward their better angels. These upstanding outsiders help show the group how to do the right thing.

People with strong virtues are often able to resist following social norms, as the psychologists Jolanda Jetten and Matthew Hornsey describe in a review paper,269 especially when they can see those norms leading to a dark place. These individuals will seem weird to their contemporaries, but later on, they may appear sage by comparison. In a 2003 study,270 Hornsey and some coauthors found that among students who felt that gay couples should be recognized under the law, those who felt their view was the morally correct one were willing to stick by their beliefs even when they were told their view wasn’t popular. For some people, it’s simply more important to stand up for their beliefs than it is to fit in.

But these moral rebels aren’t always rewarded by the rest of the group for being so virtuous. Sometimes, extremely principled people serve as an admonition that the rest of us could also have stood up for what’s right, but we chose not to. “By reminding us of our freedom to act,” Jetten and Hornsey write,271 “the rebel makes us confront our own past actions, leading to an existential crisis.”

Leslie

Having a strong moral basis for her dissent was what helped Leslie Wagner-Wilson when she needed it most: escaping the infamous cult in Jonestown, Guyana.

For Leslie, life as a peripheral member of the cult was painful. But ultimately, her outsider status is what helped her break free from the groupthink and take a huge risk in order to defend her principles—and, as it would turn out, her life.

To use the popular phrase the cult gave rise to, Leslie did not “drink the Kool-Aid.” But on the day she fled, 918 people, including U.S. Representative Leo Ryan, died in what was at that point the single largest deliberate loss of American life in history.